Student debt crisis watch: pay $18,000 of your $24,000 loan, owe $24,000

boing
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Of that $30,000 they want, most all of it (like 90%) goes to advertising, not to teaching.

Buy this book from $2 used:

You can’t buy the power source he mentions except on eBay - doesn’t matter. Buy this instead:

Get a two wire extension cord from Dollar Tree, cut off the socket about 6" from the end and use the plug and cord to power the transformer. Use wire nuts or a connection strip from ACE etc.

It’s a good exercise to make the change and learn how to adapt the experiments to the different voltages.

Try your local library for “Mullin/Simmons Electrical Wiring Residential, 18th edition”. It’s very expensive. If you want to buy a copy, an older edition from eBay will do for learning.

Your library has many books on electricity and electrical work. Your son should try and read them all but only US ones, not British stuff.

You’ll be closer to $30 than to $30,000 and he’ll still get a good basic knowledge.

It’s very important to understand that the the only electricians who make it are the ones who read and study. No one learns it sitting in a classroom. No one.

If you want to go up one level, look into distance education. I didn’t do this:

https://www.scitraining.com/electrician

but it looks OK to me. See what references you can find for other schools. And you get a certificate.

As for tools, $100 is more than enough when you go to work. Careful shopping at Walmart and even dollar stores can get you set up to work for less money. I’ve also bought stuff on eBay which was fine and much cheaper, esp. for meters and other test gear.

Hope it helps. Give me a guy who taught himself over one who went to a dubious, overcharging ‘school’ every time.

175

And ironically every time it goes, it seems that the armed forces aren’t ready. From Reagan’s invasion of Grenada, to the 9/11 attacks and the inability to get planes into the air, to Afghanistan and Rumsfeld’s “As you know, you go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time” it isn’t a truly impressive result for the $billions burned through.

Although many military contractors got very rich so there’s that I suppose.

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176

As this example shows, the college loan industry is a machine for funneling money from poor people into the pockets of bankers. College tuition should be free. Many people have produced models indicating that it could be free, at least at state institutions. However, free tuition has many opponents, including (but not limited to):

  1. People who paid for their college, and don’t think free college would be fair (to them);
  2. People who think (wrongly) that tuition is an incentive to work harder and not take education for granted;
  3. People of privilege who think that education should remain a privilege, and only be available to people who meet some criterion (wealthy enough, smart enough, white enough, whatever);
  4. Residents of Fantasyland who think that education is worthless, and the average person can do just as well checking books out of their local public library (though these same idiots often think that libraries are useless, and people can get all the information they need off the internet, except net neutrality is also bad…)
  5. People who believe tuition brings the benefits of free market competition to higher education;
  6. College administrators at public institutions who worry that legislators are unreliable funding sources, so prefer to keep control over at least one funding line, even though it often means soaking the poorest sector of the campus community (undergraduates) to subsidize high-cost expenses like biomedical research;
  7. College administrators at private institutions that know they could not compete with free public universities;
  8. People who are so used to tuition being not-free that their limited imaginations cannot visualize the better alternative.
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177

:musical_note: What a friend we have in Congress
Who will guard our every shore
Spends three quarters of our taxes
Getting ready for a war

Guns must make our coast line bristle,
And we have to fill the sky
Full of planes and guided missiles
They’ll be paid for by and by.

Have you noticed all the progress
In our mighty airborne fleet?
By the time a plane’s adopted
It’s already obsolete.

There’s no factory profit brother
And we have to do or die.
One improvement then another,
They’ll be paid for by and by.

Modern bombs are sure to carry
Loads of glory joy and thrill!
What a privilege to bury
All the dead our money kills.

Never mind the widow’s weeping.
Disgregard the orphan’s cry.
When God wakes the dead and sleeping,
They’ll be paid for by and by :musical_note:

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178

Sing it, sister.

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179

Thing is, you only have to pay back your loans when you drop below half time enrollment. So why do that? Life time learnin’… the only way I can afford my rent in the bay area. No joke, this is actually what I’ve been doing since I started college in 1998. It helps that I worked in education and didn’t have to pay for classes. Considering that this may not work forever, I’m switching from teaching to medicine.

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180

Sorry this forum seems to lack a little knowledge; no one has mentioned recourse vs no recourse loans.

Student loans are one of the few types of loans that are recourse; meaning you can’t default on the debt.

IMO, this is why student loans are complete BS. The change in student loans from no recourse to recourse was a money grab by schools and banks. All loans in the US should be non recourse. Problem solved, but not everyone can afford school, so that sucks, but I think it’s better than debtors prison that we have now.

181

Welcome to BoingBoing!

And this was mentioned. Just not by its proper name.

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182

That’s a common misconception - one sadly spread by orgs like Sallie Mae to keep people from trying.

You can, in fact, get student loans fully discharged if a bankruptcy court finds repayment would cause undue hardship.

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183

$30,000?

The average in-state tuition + fees at public four year colleges was $9,970 last year. The most expensive state avg rate was New Hampshire at $16,070. The lowest state avg was Wyoming at $5,220.

If you’re willing to go to an in-state two year college first, the average tuition + fees is $3,570.

It isn’t until you get to out-of-state and private colleges that they approach $30K.

184

That’s just tuition. Add in housing, meals, books, etc and the average cost per year is easily $25-$30k for in-state students.

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185

I don’t blame him. I think it’s most people’s plan to go to some country without a US extradition treaty if they have no hope of paying off their student loans in their lifetime. Welcome to the US where making obscene profits off the backs of people desperate to improve their standards of living is legal. Kind of makes it sound like the Beatles predicted one thing about the baby boomers, they truly have a “rubber soul”.

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186

Like many state universities in the US, the University of Michigan is a football team that indulges the existence of its namesake college for tax purposes, and those stadiums are mighty expensive.

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187

Don’t forget the Rolling Tide, the university’s sole purpose is so morons can bash their heads against other morons and get CTE before they’re picked up by the NFL.

188

Oh come now. Free housing is hardly the norm even in countries that cover the cost of college tuition and a considerable percentage of people live within commuting distance to a public college in their state.

Even if you have to get housing, there are few places that are overly expensive as long as you can round up enough roommates and live… well like a college student.

189

It’s not a crime to default on debt, student loans or other types.

190

UM is actually one of the scant handful of public universities where athletics is net financial positive. (They use a form of RCM budgeting which makes this sort of thing relatively transparent.)

191

right? it’s almost like the “free market” is a lie and government actually plays a strong role in determining which markets exist and who the winners and losers are.

so much so that, even government abdicating their responsibility means they’ve decided who wins. and it ain’t the people trying to better their lot in life, that’s for sure.

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192

As a STEM grad student, I applaud this. STEM is incredibly important, but so are other fields of scholarship and study, and neglecting any of them makes us poorer as a society, in every sense of the word.

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193

Or emigrate.to some country where they can’t collect.

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